A native San Diegan, Michele Karas works as an associate copy director for a top-five U.S. book publisher and studies poetry in the MFA program at the City College of New York, where she is also a graduate editor for the Promethean Literary Journal. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Narrative, Thrush Poetry Journal, Pea River Journal, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among other publications. Find her on Twitter @small_peace.
Drown
A curly worm sheathed in a miniature coat of armor. The rattle of a metal gate being drawn.
I never told anyone about
the summer I dropped
that pill bug
into the gutter
Angry little fist, inert little insect curled in on itself.
It was like a silver bullet, furious in its downward spiral.
How does a life get to be so small?
The clarity of the memory alternates between murky, sharp, impossible to see the truth, the depth too unfathomable.